In the Center of Authority: The Hikayat Merong Mahawangsa
In the Center of Authority: The Hikayat Merong Mahawangsa

In the Center of Authority: The Malay Hikayat Merong Mahawangsa

Hendrik M.J. Maier

ISBN: 9789672640509
Published: 31 May 2025
Copyright: 2025
Pages: xxiii + 324

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In the Center of Authority: The Malay Hikayat Merong Mahawangsa offers a close reading of the Hikayat Merong Mahawangsa, arguing that different centers of authority and culture give meaning to a fragment of Malay tradition. The author further asserts that certain centers of authority and cultural forms predominate. The work illustrates the predominance of cultural hegemony. This hegemony is shown to be articulated through the ‘Malayistics voice,’ as represented by figures like James Low and Richard O. Winstedt, and perpetuated through the mechanisms of literacy and print. This influence prevailed among the newly emerged Malay elite and literati up to the early 20th century. The book also examines the rhetoric of Orientalism, which it describes as a privileged voice of representation and a stubborn cultural strain. Drawing on Edward Said’s ideas, the book discusses the relationship between the Occident and the Orient in terms of power, domination, and complex forms of hegemony.

The book emphasizes that the Hikayat Merong Mahawangsa is both history and literature, highlighting its ambiguity and oscillation between referentiality and non-referentiality. Maier argues that priority should be given to the non-referential, or literary quality, and suggests describing the text in rhetorical terms is more rewarding. Moreover, the author posits that Orientalist discourse fails to grasp the context in which such literature was produced and sustained: the Malay tradition itself. Alienation from this tradition, a consequence of English literacy and exposure to British writings, caused Malay literati to reject traditional texts as irrelevant.

For Malays themselves, this heritage has also become a dormant corpus to which only a small number of scholars and hobbyists are truly attracted. This dormancy has created uneasiness among Malays who, in their search for a National Identity for Malaysia, are making efforts to revive the new state’s interest in it—so far largely in vain. How can the beauty of the Hikayat Seri Rama and the elegance of the Hikayat Inderaputera be revealed to modern Malaysians? And what about so-called historical texts such as the Hikayat Merong Mahawangsa: do they refer to reality and, if so, to what degree? Where does referentiality end and figurality begin? How can we make nineteenth-century Malay culture and thought more understandable? Why read the Hikayat Merong Mahawangsa at all if it does not enrich our own experience of life?

Appraisals
Acknowledgments
An Introduction

1. A Story of Authority
2. Low—the Search for Reality
The Merchant-Scientists and the Scottish Enlightenment
Low and the Hikayat Merong Mahawangsa
3. Winstedt—a Search for the Objective Vocabulary
The Scholar-Administrators and Evolutionary Positivism
Winstedt and the Hikayat Merong Mahawangsa
4. The Tradition
5. The Break
6. The Printing
7. The Textual Materials
8. A Narrative of Ambiguity

Bibliography
Index

Weight 0.5 kg
Dimensions 22.86 × 15.24 cm
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Year of Publication

2025

This path-breaking study is so much more than an exploration of a Malay indigenous historical text. It is an exemplar of how to use primary sources of all kinds to retrace the paths human minds have taken as they construct their pasts. What Amin Sweeney did for our appreciation of Malay oral literature, Hendrik Maier has done for 19th-century written texts. This is an essential work for appreciating the complexity of Malay studies and the richness of Malay inventiveness. May it inspire more research by the current generation.
— Virginia Matheson Hooker, Emeritus Professor, Australian National University

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This is a classic study of a monumental text in the history of the Malay world. An erudite and versatile scholar of comparative literature, Hendrik Maier uncovers the shifting significance of the Hikayat Merong Mahawangsa, both by insiders and by outsiders, by admirers and detractors of all things Malay. He shows the ways in which Orientalists’ rendering of the text altered what was once an organic and dynamic oral heritage into a textualized and ossified canon. Clearly, the project of decolonization is far from complete. By uncovering the fragments of colonial legacies that haunt us till this very day, Maier provides us with new ways to read and re-read Malay traditions. A gripping analysis of cultural imperialism that offers hopeful possibilities of resistance. A seminal work!
— Khairudin Aljunied, Associate Professor, National University of Singapore

⁕

The most exciting study of traditional Malay literature for decades, with wide theoretical implications. Circling around a single pre-modern text—looking at how that text has been read over time by British scholar-officials and modern Malaysians—Maier argues that colonial learning brought a break with the past, undermining the authority of heritage. Advocating ‘strong textualism’ and ‘intertextual’ methodologies—and exploring ‘strangeness’—he suggests such texts could assist in creating a new type of knowledge, less dependent on the West.
— Anthony Milner, Australian National University and author of The Malays (2008)

⁕

In the Center of Authority is an eye-opening book that explores the heart of how a literary culture is formed and shared, and how composers absorb from that culture and, at the moment of composition, consciously or unconsciously, draw from other oral or written texts as they compose their works. Besides a close reading of the text, the personages, and the events in the unfolding of the hikayat, Maier also gives space to the contributions of British scholars like Hugh Low and Richard Winstedt and how their readings may shed light on the interpretation of Malay classical texts. The study further looks at the various editions of manuscripts and the printed works themselves, along with analyses of them and their possible function in a British colonial curriculum. However, in the end, Maier finds order, though the thought of indeterminacies still lingers.
— Muhammad Haji Salleh, Emeritus Professor and Malaysian National Laureate